Orson Welles, Vol I (77 page)

After reciting a couple of the speeches of Chorus from
Henry V
to immense approval, Robert Speaight
was told not to bother to come to rehearsals at all; he needn’t come back till the technical period in Boston. He was the linkman; as there was nothing to link yet, what would be the point of hanging around? It may be suspected that Welles was happy not to have the punctilious, slightly pretentious actor around; it might have made him feel nervous. There is a strong sense, through all the whiskey
fumes and raconteurial bonhomie, of a growing terror about the reality of getting the monster on the stage; but also of a growing resentment at the pressure. All work and no play was making Orson a very grumpy boy. He wanted to have
fun
; instead he had to work. Why had it all become so difficult? His relationship with Meredith gave him a sort of encouragement; the two naughty boys who had to be
broken up. They played truant together. The Director As Truant would make an interesting, if brief, study, Welles being pretty well the only instance in recorded history. The director, if he does nothing else, simply has to be there, and he has to be there on time. Punctuality is not merely the politeness of directors; it is their raison d’être. They create the rhythm, the attitudes, the energy
of the enterprise. On
Five Kings
, Welles was abdicating from that crucial responsibility.

Houseman adds an interesting gloss: he believed Welles to be involved in competitive debauchery with his own dead father: ‘having demonstrated his superiority as an artist and a public figure, he must now defeat his rival on his own grounds – that of Champagne Charley, the man about town … it was as though
he was determined to bury the ghost of Richard Welles, once and for all, under the mass of his own excesses.’
¹³
If there was a ghost spurring him on, it is much more likely to have been that of his mother, demanding more and better work from him, refusing to allow him to derive satisfaction from his achievements; the excess was an attempt to escape from that nagging inner voice. Houseman’s description
of the scale of his indulgence details the meals, each one a feast; the nightly consumption of one and two bottles of whiskey or brandy; the sexual prowess ‘which was reported in statistical detail … also, apparently, immense’. A final detail of Houseman’s is striking: Welles had bought himself a huge new apartment on East
57th Street, replete with stained glass windows, balcony and monumental
fireplace, filled, Houseman says, with enormous furniture: an odd preview of Charles Foster Kane’s ‘Xanadu’. The whole catalogue suggests someone who on the one hand needed to lose himself, on the other to make himself feel bigger. In fact all he succeeded in was becoming bigger – not feeling it.

Eventually (a week later than planned; Baltimore had been dropped) the technical period in Boston
arrived: now everything would fall into place. But of course, the precise opposite happened. Jean Rosenthal and her team were as well prepared as they could be; her lighting plot was as thorough as she could make it without Welles’s input. The set was up, and it seemed to be more or less as conceived. However, due to one of a thousand failures of communication, its basic colour had been changed
from burgundy to silvery-grey without Millia Davenport, the costume designer, having been notified. She had based the costumes on silver and peach – disastrous against the new colour scheme; virtually every costume had to be remade, dyed or altered in some way. But this was as nothing compared to the gradual realisation that the show, which had never been run from beginning to end, would last about
five and a half hours. Panic cutting was immediately undertaken. The forty-six scenes of the three-act show were reduced to thirty-two; entire characters and sub-plots were axed. These cuts, designed to maintain the narrative line, failed however to take into account the turntable, whose moves had been plotted in some detail, linked to particular lines in the dialogue, and now flicked restlessly
back and forward, sometimes changing position every thirty seconds. On stage the chaos was complete. The stage management attempted to try out the innumerable mortars required for the show’s many explosions while actors ran through battle scenes, putting their cross-bow classes to the test; arrows flew everywhere, mostly landing in the auditorium into which smoke from the mortars was now belching,
while the turntable proved to be totally out of control, either creeping round with infuriating slowness or suddenly whizzing manically off in the opposite direction.

Lighting rehearsals, scheduled for ten in the morning, started at midnight. Welles hurled himself at his task with manic energy. Joseph Hardy, then a Boston drama student, slipped away from his job at the Hide-A-Way Restaurant,
hoping to catch a glimpse of him in person. ‘Welles, looking like a large moon-faced boy about six foot two inches was bellowing orders. He shouted
Stop that hammering!
in such a roar that everyone cringed. When a girl assistant
entered from the wings with a problem he embraced her passionately looking aloft and shocking a New England boy of twenty. Welles then stepped into the orchestra and took
a belt from a whiskey bottle, barking commands.’
¹⁴
He demanded a further postponement of the opening; Houseman, under severe financial pressure from the Theatre Guild (who had set an absolute ceiling of $10,000 on expenditure before opening), refused; Welles threw a telephone at him. He was, understandably, on the edge of complete hysteria. When one of the actors complained because he kept the
company waiting forty minutes while he talked to Meredith, he threw a stool at him. But it was Houseman who bore the brunt of the worst tantrums. Not knowing that Welles had expressly forbidden it, he ordered the prop department to put dry ice in Falstaff’s tankard to simulate mulled wine. Finding it, and finding that Houseman had ordered it, Welles fell to the floor accusing Houseman of having finally
succeeded in poisoning him. He then screamed for milk, swigged large quantities of it, spat it up all over the floor, and was finally driven back to the Ritz-Carlton ‘having achieved,’ Houseman drily notes, ‘his real objective, which was, once again, to avoid rehearsing the second act.’
¹⁵

In these situations, the nightmare eventually gives way to mere disaster. Somehow, the show opens; and
then – sometimes, but not always – the disaster can be worked on. Very occasionally, it is turned into a triumph. This was not the pattern of
Five Kings
. The opening night at the Colonial Theatre in Boston was a semi-disaster; it never got very much better, despite a great deal of work by Welles and the company. The show in Boston started as badly as it could have done from a technical point of
view. Lawrence Langner wrote an account of it in
The Magic Curtain
which takes more delight in the misfortune than he may have felt at the time. He describes the unhappy Robert Speaight making his first entrance – the first moment of the show – in total darkness. A spotlight eventually appeared, but never on him. He spent the whole of the Prologue running around the forestage, in pursuit of the
light. In the midst of this, a brilliant light suddenly went on behind the silk curtain, revealing the silhouette of a dozen extras strapping on their codpieces. The light went out as suddenly as it had gone on, leaving the Boston audience rubbing its eyes. At this point, according to Dick Barr, an old lady in the front row urgently beckoned the actor. Thoroughly confused, he leaned towards her.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘would you hand this note to Mr Meredith?’ Langner continues: ‘his prologue ultimately over, he tried to get
back onto the revolving stage again, which transported him to the wings in imminent peril of his life. The traveller curtains were then drawn open, disclosing a large group of stage hands running off the stage, after which the play proper began.’
¹⁶

This first scene,
over the corpse of Richard II, and the first Boar’s Head scene leading into the robbery went smoothly and effectively enough. At Speaight’s next entrance, he found the light but lost his page in the book from which he was reading; having found it and completed his narration, he avoided the turntable, walking instead along the forestage, from which there was, alas, no exit. ‘By the time he tried
to struggle through, the curtains were flung back and covered him in his corner. The next time the curtains were drawn together, Speaight was revealed crouching in the corner.’ Trying to escape, he broke through the curtains, but by now the turntable was revolving, so, to avoid being struck again by scenery, the desperate actor leaped off the forestage into the orchestra pit, to the delighted applause
of the audience, who from that point on broke into merry smiles at his every appearance, in anticipation of further catastrophe. The smile would soon be on the other side of their faces. People in the front rows fled as the turntable whizzed round at increasingly alarming speed, hurling pieces of wooden scenery and flaming arrows into their laps; at one point, it moved so swiftly that extras
were thrown off it and into the wings. Reversing Karl Marx’s axiom about great events always recurring, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,
Five Kings
was like a tragic re-run of
Horse Eats Hat
. All the carefully rehearsed calamities of that show returned, but for real. Small wonder that by the time the traveller curtain had travelled its last – 12.20 a.m., four and a quarter
hours after the show had begun – the auditorium was less full than at the beginning. The curtain call, however, was effusive – partly orchestrated by Gertrude Lawrence and her
Skylark
company who were in the audience. ‘Not until Mr Welles, still wearing the flesh of Falstaff, expressed appreciation and voiced apology,’
¹⁷
reported
The New York Times
, ‘were his admirers content to depart. By all
tokens, they would have remained if his
Five Kings
had been raised to ten or a dozen.’ It was one of those evenings, characteristic of the preview period and the out-of-town tour, where the audience, though aware of problems and shortcomings, feels that it has been on a long journey with the performers; that it has climbed Everest with them.

The reviews were on the whole generous in overlooking
the running problems (‘when practice oils up the mechanics of the
revolving stage, those thirty-two scenes will be gone with the wind before you can say
Five Kings
’) and by no means unanimously unenthusiastic.
‘FIVE KINGS EXCITING FOR WORLD PREMIER AUDIENCE’
¹⁸
said the
Boston Evening American’s
Peggy Doyle: ‘If they don’t stop him, the fat boy of Broadway is going to make Shakespeare competition
for
Hellzapoppin
. He is a director-producer to reckon with and his motion-picture technique in the handling of this fast-paced production with the chorus or interlocutor in place of subtitles, an inspiration.’ The cinematic quality of the production was lost on no one. The chief fascination for most reviewers was Welles’s Falstaff: Miss Doyle was transported. ‘We wouldn’t change an eyelash shading
his rheumy eye. He is magnificently lusty and splendidly vulgar, and when he is practising his inveterate habit of playing on words, robustly comic. The wonder of it is that this voluminous old bag of wind and wit is actually a handsome, 23-year-old youth under his blowsy gray wig and filthy ragtag garments.’ There was more wonder from Miss Doyle’s colleague, L.A. Sloper, despite reservations:
‘There are moments when mannerisms intrude. Mr Welles has an odd habit of dividing his sentences abruptly in the middle, without reference to meaning or to dramatic effect.’
¹⁹
He was particularly enthusiastic about ‘something human and something pathetic that endears him to us. This human quality and this pathos were deftly caught by Mr Welles.’ He describes a moment that throws us twenty-five
years ahead to the film
Chimes at Midnight
. ‘There was a touching dignity in the quiet way in which Sir John turns to speak with Shallow of the money he owes him, and then leaves the stage, his vast bulk accompanied only by the tiny figure of his page. This was the high point,’ says Mr Sloper, in a gentle allusion to the length of the show, ‘of as much of the presentation as I was able to see
last night.’

That, as they say, was the end of the good news. John K. Hutchens, the formidable critic of the
Boston Evening Transcript
, weighed in, pulling no punches: ‘To this courier, just back from Agincourt, it seems a ponderous marathon without style or particular point of view and utterly lacking in the magic with which this same Mercury Theatre once finely honored the bard in
Caesar
. Circus is no casual word for it.’
²⁰
Nor was he impressed by Welles: ‘Mr Welles is simply not funny here. His humor, such as it is, does not bubble up out of the great Falstaffian heart. It is laconic and mechanical.’ Even Hutchens, though, was struck by the pathos he brought to the renunciation scene. Praising Meredith and Speaight (but not John Emery: ‘having shouted himself hoarse, he was not
at
his best’) he concluded ‘when it is all over, you find yourself wishing that they had done one play instead of three, and had done it three times as well’.

Or had six months to rehearse it, perhaps. From now until the show was finally closed down, Welles never ceased trying to pull
Five Kings
together. This was, after all, only the first leg of an out-of-town tour. The New York press was
hovering.
Variety
, in its brass tacks way, had already passed judgement: ‘Orson Welles has bitten off a big hunk in his production of
Five Kings
, and he will have to do a lot of chewing during the tryout here.’
²¹
Its prescription for success was to cut more. The
Times
was troubled by the turntable: ‘Like Ol’ Man River, it threatens to engulf the show as it still keeps rollin’ along.’
²²
Time
was
witty, too, but more sceptical: ‘What might have been a tour de force jumps so fast from one thing to another as to be a non-sequitur de force.
Five Kings
covers Shakespeare as a two-day Cook’s tour covers England: 8.45 visit Mistress Quickly’s Inn. See Falstaff, Prince Hal, Bardolph, Poins. 9.31: Good view from the train (no time to get off) of the Justice Shallow country. 9.58: Trip to Shrewsbury.
See Hotspur killed.’
²³